Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 22:32:05 +0300 (EET DST)
From: Jukka Korpela <jkorpela@cc.hut.fi>
To: www-html <www-html@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Soft hyphen (Re: Cougar comments) (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.96.970512204409.245X-100000@enoshima>
Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.3.96.970512222002.26424C-100000@alpha.hut.fi>
If the Unicode consortium (well, actually the president, I suppose) wishes
to answer a question about which there is considerable disagreement
with a very short note in the style "Roma locuta est", I _still_ think
the ISO wording in ISO 8859-1 is definitive and clear. And ISO 8859-1
is far more widely known and supported than Unicode so far. And the very
idea of having an invisible character (or, rather, unpredictably visible
or invisible character) in a character set is strange.
Can Unicode consortium really declare an ISO 8859-1 graphic character
invisible? Just by saying how things are, with no rational arguments or
discussion of contrary arguments presented? If it does, should anyone
care?
Well, the _theoretical_ discussion is rather futile, since soft hyphen
has never been implemented in Web browsers in the way Unicode suggests
and probably never will. Even if it were, it would contribute ridiculously
little to the solution of hyphenation problems. My suggestion is simply
that people should stop nagging about browsers not implementing something
that is neither de facto nor de iure standard. Just de ficto standard.
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/%7ejkorpela/